Car crash obliterates iconic roadside oddity in troubled NorCal town

On a brisk November evening, on a drive through the tiny town of Orick some 300 miles north of San Francisco, I scanned the roadside in search of a giant, famous peanut.

The 6-foot-tall, 9-foot-wide, 9-ton peanut was carved from a redwood trunk by chainsaw back in 1977. Loggers then transported it to Washington D.C. as part of a protest against the expansion of Redwood National Park, which threatened their livelihoods. They hoped to present it to President Jimmy Carter, a former peanut farmer, with an attached sign that read: “It may be peanuts to you, but it’s jobs to us!”

Instead, the president’s aides turned the peanut away, and the loggers drove it back to Orick.

The park expanded, the town of Orick fell into decline, and the peanut has been sitting in a gas station parking lot ever since.

Well, what remains of it, that is. Earlier this year, someone crashed a car into the peanut, transforming it into a pile of rotten wood fragments.

I drove to Orick because I wanted to see what remained of the peanut, and also to try to find out what would become of it. As it turns out, the peanut is a bit of a touchy subject around here, perhaps because it represents the beginning of the town’s long, ongoing period of decline.

Long before the Orick peanut came into existence, its home was a place of abundance. For millennia, members of the Yurok tribe thrived here in the heart of their ancestral territory, where their village Owr-rekw was surrounded by wild game, edible plants, a healthy river and a vast ocean. 

After white settlers forced the tribe out in the late 1800s, they began chopping down trees at a rapid rate, and the demand for redwood soared during the construction boom following World War II. Back then, the town had four sawmills and plenty of timber jobs to support a population of nearly 3,000 people. Logging trucks rattled along the town’s two-lane highway, which was flanked by motels, restaurants, bars and stores. There were four churches and a 350-seat movie theater, and the town’s rodeo attracted hundreds of visitors.

But in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson set aside 58,000 acres of ancient redwoods just outside of Orick to create Redwood National Park. The environmental movement was growing, and within the park boundaries were thousands of acres of what had been valuable timberland, including many of the world’s tallest trees. Large swaths of the surrounding watershed remained unprotected, and for 10 years, loggers continued clear-cutting the area as quickly as they could.

With the chainsaws still humming a half-mile from the park, environmentalists began pushing to expand it. In response, loggers created the “Talk to America” convoy, a motorcade of 25 semi-trucks aiming to spread their message while delivering the Orick peanut — which they referred to as Mr. Peanut — to D.C. The nine-day journey is documented in a short film “Enough is Enough,” and the iconic peanut makes an appearance just after the three-minute mark. Later on, the film captures White House staffer Scott Burnett rejecting Mr. Peanut.

“Although we sympathize with the problem that you’re having with the enlargement of the Redwood National Park, we don’t feel this is an appropriate use of this piece of redwood and we’re not going to be able to accept it on behalf of the president or the Department of the Interior,” Burnett says.

Upon its return to Orick, Mr. Peanut was offloaded into the parking lot of the Shoreline gas station, where it has been rotting for nearly a half century. Most of the people who helped with the construction and transport of the peanut have passed away, and certainly, most of the tourists who drive through Orick are unaware of its history. 

But “it’s really a fascinating part of the region’s history,” said Katie Buesch, the former Interim Director-Curator at the Clarke Historical Museum in Eureka, who once researched the peanut for a museum exhibit on Redwood National and State Parks. She sees the peanut as a testament to the impact the environmental movement had on Orick — an impact that continues today. “People are still trying to find a way to make a livelihood in this really rural area where there’s not a lot of economic opportunity,” she said. “So this is kind of an icon of that transition period.”

Although there was some discussion in the late ‘70s about erecting a building around the peanut to commemorate it, Buesch said, instead it still sits by the road without even a placard to identify it. Most tourists drive through the town without stopping; many businesses, aside from a few redwood burl shops, some cabins and an elk burger shack, have closed. Orick has become the least prosperous gateway town in America, but some people have ideas about fixing that.

In 2020, the Yurok tribe bought the fueling station and market and the nine acres surrounding it. The peanut came with the purchase. The tribe recently secured a $6 million grant to redevelop the property, and plans are afoot to build a 6,000-square-foot development resembling a traditional Yurok home, with a laundromat and tribal government offices inside. The idea is that it will serve as a welcome center to the area, and a revitalization project for Orick, according to Yurok Economic Development Corporation’s Executive Director Raymond Bacon. 

The peanut was supposed to be part of that.“The initial plan with the peanut was to basically put it on a pedestal and tell the story,” Bacon said. “Unfortunately, we missed that opportunity.”

Sometime between the night of June 3 and the following morning, a vehicle slammed into the decomposing peanut, breaking it into hundreds, if not thousands, of splinters that one Facebook commenter referred to as “peanut butter.” According to a local news report, the vehicle’s front end was badly damaged, and the incident was “just listed as a vehicle versus a log,” California Highway Patrol spokesperson Paul Craft told the Times-Standard.

For Orick Chamber of Commerce President Donna Hufford, a fourth-generation resident, the destruction of the peanut was yet another blow to a long-suffering town. “The peanut was one of our attractions,” Hufford said. “I’ve been here 50-something years. And every year, we’re going, ‘We can’t get any worse. It’s going to get better. It’s going to get better.’ And we’ve worked on that line of thinking. We continue as a family to try to do everything we can.”

Hufford’s son and daughter-in-law are revamping an old motel into Roosevelt Base Camp, and its first six rooms opened in 2022. They’ll soon open six more, along with a new Palm Café, the old motel’s eatery that closed in 2019. Hufford is also hopeful that come summer, a pizza truck will supplement the meager restaurant options in town.

Things don’t look particularly good for the original peanut. I spent some time with it in the parking lot on that November night. About half of it was still intact, but the other half was in a bunch of sad-looking pieces. Bacon tried to salvage some of it, he told me, but that wasn’t possible. “Time takes its toll, right?” he said.

This may be the end of Mr. Peanut, but the legend will live on. The Yurok tribe has plans to make a replica out of some downed redwoods and display original photos alongside it.

“It may not be as large as the old version because that size of wood is real hard to come by,” Bacon said. “But we do have plans to continue to tell the story.”